The Trail to Buddha's Mirror (2 page)

“I know.”

“—San Francisco, where he stayed at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The conference lasted a week. Pendleton never came back.”

“What do the police have to say?”

“Haven’t talked to them.”

“Isn’t that sort of SOP in a missing-person case?”

Graham grinned a grin custom-made to hack Neal off. “Who said he was missing?”

“You did.”

“No, I didn’t. I said he didn’t come back. There’s a difference. We know where he is. He just won’t come home.”

All right, Neal thought, I’ll play.

“Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why won’t he come home?”

“I’m pleased to see that you’re asking some better questions, son.”

“So answer it.”

“He’s got himself a China doll.”

“By which you mean,” Neal asked, “that he’s in the company of an Oriental lady of hired affections?”

“A China doll.”

“So what’s the problem and why are we involved?”

“Another good question.”

Graham got up from the chair and walked into the kitchen. He opened the middle cabinet of three, reached to the top shelf, and pulled down Neal’s bottle of scotch.

“A place for everything, and everything in its place,” he said cheerfully. “Another thing I taught you.”

He came back into the sitting room, reached into his case, and came out with a small plastic travel cup, the kind that telescopes out from a disk into a regular old drinking vessel. He poured three fingers of whiskey and then offered Neal the bottle.

“Damp in here,” Graham said.

Neal took the bottle and set it on the table. He didn’t want to end up half in the bag and take this job out of sentiment.

Graham lifted his cup and said, “To the queen and all his family.”

He knocked back two fingers of the scotch and let the warmth spread through him. If he had been a cat he would have purred, but being a cretin, he just leered. Braced against the chill, he continued, “Pendleton is the world’s greatest authority on chickenshit. AgriTech has millions of dollars sunk into chickenshit.”

“Let me guess,” Neal said. “Does the Bank have millions of dollars sunk into AgriTech?”

Graham’s sudden appearance was starting to make sense to Neal.

“That’s my boy,” Graham said.

That says it, too, Neal thought. I’m Graham’s boy, I’m Levine’s boy, but most of all, I’m the Bank’s boy.

The Bank was a quiet little financial institute in Providence, Rhode Island, that promised its wealthy clients two things: absolute privacy from the prying eyes of the press, the public, and the prosecutors; and discreet help on the side with those little problems of life that couldn’t be settled with just plain cash.

That was where Neal came in. He and Graham worked for a secret branch of the bank called “Friends of the Family.” There was no sign on the door, but anybody who had the necessary portfolio knew that he could come into the back office if he had a problem and talk to Ethan Kitteredge, and that Ethan Kitteredge would find a way to work things out, free of charge.

Usually Kitteredge, known to his employees as “the Man,” would work things out by buzzing for Ed Levine, who would phone down to New York for Joe Graham, who would fetch Neal Carey. Neal would then trundle off to find somebody’s daughter, or take a picture of somebody’s wife playing Hide-the-Hot-Dog in the Plaza Hotel, or break into somebody’s apartment to find that all-important second set of books.

In exchange, Friends had sent him to a toney private school, paid his rent, and picked up his college bills.

“So,” Neal said, “The Bank has a humongous loan out to AgriTech, and one of its star scientists has taken a sabbatical. So what?”

“Chickenshit.”

“Yeah, right. What’s the big deal about chickenshit?”

“Not
any
chickenshit.
Pendleton’s
chickenshit. Chickenshit is fertilizer, right? You spread it on stuff to make it grow, which sounds pretty fucking gross to me, but hey…. Anyway, Pendleton’s been working for umptedy-zumptedy years on a way to squeeze more growing juice out of chickenshit by mixing it with water treated with certain bacteria. This, by the way, is called an ‘enhancing process.’

“Now it used to be that you couldn’t mix chickenshit in water because it would lose its juice, but with Pendleton’s process, not only can you mix it with water, but you get something like triple the effect.

“Naturally, this would make a nice little item on AgriTech’s shelf. I might even buy you some for Christmas. You could rub it on your dick, although I doubt the stuff could be
that
good.”

“Thank you.”

“But don’t get your hopes up, because just when Doc Guano gets
this close,”
said Graham, holding his thumb and forefinger a sliver apart, “to inventing Supershit, he goes off to this conference and meets Miss Wong.”

“Is that really her name?”

“Do I know? Wong, Wang, Ching, Chang, what’s the difference?”

“Yeah, so? Doctor This, Doctor That, what’s the difference? I’ll bet you AgriTech has more than one biochemist.”

“Not like Pendleton, they don’t. Besides, he took his notes with him.”

Neal could see it coming and he didn’t want this job. Maybe Robert Pendleton didn’t want to finish
his
research, he thought, but I want to finish mine. Get my master’s and go on for the old Ph.D. Find a job in some little state college somewhere and spend the rest of my life reading books instead of running dirty errands for the Man.

“Have the cops pick him up for theft, then. The notes are AgriTech’s property,” Neal said.

Graham shook his head. “Then maybe he’d be too unhappy to play with his test tubes anymore. The AgriTech people don’t want their professor in the slammer; they want their chickenshit in the pot.”

Graham took the bottle off the table and poured himself another drink. He was enjoying himself immensely. Aggravating Neal was almost worth the terrifying flight over, the endless trip to Yorkshire, and the hike up that damn hill. It was good to see the little shit again.

“If he doesn’t want to come back, he doesn’t want to come back,” Neal said.

Graham tossed back the whiskey.

“You have to
make
him want to,” he said.

“You mean ‘you’ in the collective sense, right? As in
‘one
would have to make him want to.’”

“I mean ‘you’ in the sense of
you,
Neal Carey.”

All of a sudden, Neal Carey felt a lot of sympathy for Dr. Robert Pendleton. Each of them was shacked up with something he loved—Pendleton with his woman and Neal with his books—and now they were each being pulled back, kicking and screaming, to the chickenshit.

Because of him, they get me, Neal thought, and because of me they’ll get him. It’s all done with mirrors. He reached for the bottle and poured a healthy drink into his coffee cup.

“What if I don’t want to?” he asked.

Graham started rubbing his fake hand into his real one. It was a habit he had when he was worried or had something unpleasant to say.

Neal saved him the trouble. “Then you’ll have to
make
me want to?”

Graham was really working on the hand now. Pissing Neal off was fun, but extorting him wasn’t. However, the Man, Levine, and Graham had agreed that Neal had been shut up with his books too long, and if they didn’t get him back into some kind of action, they would lose him. That happened sometimes; a first-class UC—an undercover guy—would be put on R-and-R after a tough job and never come back. Or, worse, the guy would come back dull and rusty and do something stupid and get hurt. Happened all the time, but Graham wasn’t going to let it happen to Neal. So he had come to fetch him for this dumb, chicken-shit job.

“You been away from Columbia for what, a year now?” Graham asked.

“About that. You sent me on a job, remember?”

Neal sure as hell remembered. They had sent him to London on a hopeless search for the runaway daughter of a big-time politico—just to keep his wife content and quiet—and he had screwed up and actually found her. She was hooking and hooked, and he had wrenched her off her pimp and the junk and delivered her to her mother. Which was what the Man wanted him to do, but the politician was sure as hell pissed off, so Friends had to pretend that Neal had screwed them over, too. And so he had “disappeared.” Happily.

“Can you do that?” Graham asked. “Just take off from gradu-ass school like that?”

“No, Graham, you can’t. Friends of the Family fixed it. What am I telling you for? You’re the one who fixed it.”

Graham smiled. “And now we’re asking you for a little favor.”

“Or you’ll
unfix
it?”

Graham shrugged a that’s-life shrug.

“Why me?” Neal whined. “Why not you? Or Levine?”

“The Man wants you.”

“Why?”

Because, Graham thought, we ain’t going to sit around with our hooters in our hands while you turn yourself into a hermit. I know you, son. You like to be alone so you can brood on things and get happily miserable. You need to get back to work and back to school—back with some
people.
Get your feet back on concrete.

“You and Pendleton are both eggheads,” Graham said. “The Man figures he’s been paying for your expensive education for jobs just like this one.”

Neal took a hit of scotch. He could feel Graham pulling in the line.

“Pendleton’s some sort of biochemist. I study eighteenth-century English Lit!” Neal said.
Tobias Smollett: The Outsider in Eighteenth-Century Literature:
Neal’s thesis title and a sure cure for insomnia. Except, that is, for eighteenth-century buffs. Both of them would love it.

“I guess all eggheads look alike to the Man.”

Neal tried a different tack.

“I’m out of shape, Graham. Very rusty. I’ve worked maybe two cases in the last two years and I screwed
both
of them up. You don’t want me.”

“You brought Allie Chase home.”

“Not before I botched it up and almost got us both killed. I’m no good at it anymore, Dad, I—”

“Stop being such a crybaby! What are we asking here? You go to San Francisco and find the happy couple, which shouldn’t be too difficult even for you, seeing as they’re in the Chinatown Holiday Inn, Room ten-sixteen, right there in your file. You get the broad alone, you slip her some cash, and she dumps him. She’s no dope. She knows that money for nothing is better than money for something.

“Then you buddy up to Pendleton, have a few shooters with him, listen to his sob story, and pour him onto a plane. What’ll it take? Three, four days?”

Neal walked over to the window. The rain had let up a little bit, but the fog was heavier than ever.

“I’m glad you have this all figured out, Graham. Are you going to do my research for me, too?”

“Just do the job and come back. You can spend the whole summer here at the Mildew Hilton if you want. You have to be back at school September ninth, though.”

He reached into his case and pulled out a large manila envelope.

“The schedules and book lists for your—what do you call them?—your seminars. I worked it out with Boskin.”

Graham is so damned good, Neal thought. Old Graham brings the prizes with him and dangles them in front of my nose: seminars, book lists…. You have to hand it to him—he knows his whores.

“You’re too good to me, Dad.”

“Tell me about it.”

So there it is, Neal thought. A few days of sleazy work in California, then back to my happy monk’s cell on the moor. Finish my reading, then back to graduate school. Jesus, this double life of mine. Sometimes I feel like my own twin brother. Who’s insane.

“Yeah, okay,” Neal said.

“I’m telling you,” Graham said, “this one is a grounder, easy throw to first, out of the inning.”

“Right.”

So maybe it’s time to come down from the hill, Neal thought. Ease myself back into the world with this sleazy little job. Maybe it’s too easy up here, where I don’t have to deal with anything or anyone except writers who’ve been dead for a couple hundred years.

He looked out the window and couldn’t tell whether he was looking at rain or fog. Both, he guessed.

“Have you heard from Diane?” Graham asked.

Neal thought about the letter that had sat unopened on the table for six months. He’d been afraid to read it.

“I never answered her letter,” Neal said.

“You’re a stooge.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Did you think she was just going to wait around for you?”

“No. I didn’t think that.”

He had left her with no explanation, just that he had to go do a job, and he’d been gone now for almost a year. Graham had contacted her, told her something, and forwarded her letter. But Neal couldn’t bring himself to open it. He’d rather let the thing die than read that she was killing it. But she wasn’t the one who had killed it, he thought. She was just the one who had the guts to write the obituary.

Graham wouldn’t let it drop. “She left the apartment.”

“Diane wouldn’t be the kind to stay.”

“She found a place on 104th, between Broadway and West End. She has a roommate. A woman.”

“What did you do? Follow her?!”

“Sure. I thought you’d want to know.”

“Thanks.”

“Maybe look her up when you get back to the city.”

“What are you, my mother?”

Graham shook his head and poured himself another shot.

“Way I look at it,” he said, “she’s a friend of the family.”

He never should have opened the door.

2

She was a looker, all right, this Lila.

That was her name, or the name she used working conventions, anyway. Neal learned this from the file Graham had given him, which he had ample time to peruse on the endless trip to San Francisco. It included a Polaroid taken at dinner by one of Pendleton’s AgriTech buddies, which showed Pendleton sitting at a banquet table with a striking Oriental woman. The buddy had scrawled “Robert and Lila” along the bottom.

Looking at the photo, Neal couldn’t blame Pendleton for preferring Lila to his Bunsen burners. Her face was heart-shaped, her hair was long, straight, and satin black, swept up on the left by a blue cloisonné comb. She had beautiful, slanted eyes that gazed on Pendleton with what looked like affection as he struggled with his chopsticks. She was smiling at him. If she was a pro, Neal thought, she was a classy pro, and he liked her just from looking at her picture.